Fire in the Water, Earth in the Air: Legends
of West Texas Musicby Christopher OglesbyPublished by the University
of Texas Press: "As a whole, the interviews create
a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also
of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues
such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue.
This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets
to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often
inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is
the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor,
and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go
mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing
likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and
Joe Ely."

"Indeed, Oglesby's introduction of more
than two dozen musicians who called Lubbock home should be required
reading not only for music fans, but for Lubbock residents and
anyone thinking about moving here. On these pages, music becomes
a part of Lubbock's living history."
- William Kerns, Lubbock Avalanche Journal

Chris: Before we start, do you prefer to be called
Doctor Skoob or Doug Haines?

Skoob: Well, Doug is my name.

Chris: Let's clear this up: Are you Doctor Skoob, or
is that the name of the band? What is the difference between
Doctor Skoob and Doug Haines?

Skoob: I got nicknamed Doctor Skoob by a bass player
I used to play with named Jesse Dalton;
Jesse plays with Green Mountain Grass now. Jesse is kind of
smartass. I had this Skooby Doo T-shirt which I guess I wore
more than I realized. My mom has that shirt now because I'm not
allowed to wear it anymore. One day when some girl asked us what
the name of our band was, Jesse looks up, points at me and says,
"Well, that guy over there is Doctor Skoob and we're the
Snack-tones." Since we didn't have a name yet, we became
Doctor Skoob and the Snack-tones. We eventually dropped the Snack-tones
part and the band became known as just Doctor Skoob. That was
right around the same time I started playing with Los Sonsabitches.

Chris: You aren't originally from Lubbock; so how soon
after you got to Lubbock did you start playing in bands? Go back
to how you first got to Lubbock and then tell me about Los Sonsabitches.

Skoob: I came to Lubbock on accident. I was on my way
to California. I have a friend who had inherited a cabin at Lake
Tahoe; he and I were going to live out there and be ski bums.
At that time, I did not play guitar or anything do to with music.
I did own an atrocious looking green guitar, which I had bought
only because I just happened to be driving by a music store right
when I heard a radio advertisement they were having a going-out-of-business
sale, but I had never played the damn thing. I was living in
College Station at the time, where I was an Aggie for two years.
My mother grew up in College Station, so with family ties there,
A&M was the only school I had even applied to. I had taken
a lesson or two on the guitar but it just wasn't really clicking
for me at the time.
My friend was someone I had gone to high school with and lived
with in College Station but he had already moved out to California
ahead of me, where his family was originally from. I was going
to meet him out in Tahoe, and I was driving a 1986 Suburban at
the time, which we all called "Urb." This was in 1994.
I was just getting the hell out of Texas when the transmission
went out in Post. While I was waiting to get the transmission
repaired, I stayed with a friend of mine in Lubbock and ended
up blowing most of the money I had saved getting the transmission
fixed. So I was stuck in Lubbock. My friend in Lubbock is a girl
who needed a roommate for that summer, so I lived in that house
at 27th and Avenue Q for awhile. I ended up liking Lubbock for
some reason - I don't know why - and ended up just settling there;
I still had enough money saved up to cover the cheap rent but
not enough to move on to California.
When the summer ended another guy and I moved into a place on
22nd and Q. It was in that house where we had a storm door which
was loose and always swinging back and forth in the wind. One
night, it was a friend's birthday and we were having a party.
I went out in the backyard and the door swung at me; I put my
hand out to keep it from hitting me, and my arm went right through
the glass. I cut the crap out of myself, so bad you could see
the bone. I told my roommate to call 911; I was fairly calm but
kind of in a daze, so they took me to the doctor. The only reason
this is important is because, had I been somewhere else other
than Lubbock where they have lots of farming accidents, the doctor
might not have been near as qualified to work this injury. The
doctor did an amazing job repairing my hand; turns out he's one
of the top people in his field of repairing hands. As my hand
got better, I made up my mind that I was going to start playing
guitar because that was at the top of the list of things I would
regret never having been able to do if I didn't get the use of
my hand back, almost like a near-death experience. After I injured
my hand, my father and I made a deal that he would pay for my
medical bills if I would continue to finish college, since he
was disappointed I had dropped out anyway. So I stayed in Lubbock
and became a Tech student for awhile. To be honest, at A&M
I was still too wild and immature for college, but when I enrolled
at Tech my first three semesters I earned a 4.0 GPA. I got into
school more and enjoyed my classes. So the hand injury gave me
a whole new lease on life.
I took guitar lessons from David Brandon, who is a world famous
classical guitarist. He frequently plays with Christopher Parkening, who wins all the Grammy's
for classical. David is his partner and lives in Lubbock, Texas.
David taught me, and he taught my friend Shad
Daugherty. He's an amazing teacher and has been teaching
guitar since he was about eleven years old. He has a way of explaining
things; I had had lessons before and never got it and after just
a couple of lessons with David, I was playing and I was hooked.

Chris: How did you get connected to David Brandon?

Skoob: He was the only guitar teacher listed in the
Lubbock Yellow Pages at the time.Up
until that time, I had been trying to be a writer; I was working
on a novel and couldn't finish. Once I learned chords on the
guitar, I realized that I could write songs a lot quicker than
I could write a book, say what I wanted to say, and actually
complete them. That's how I became a songwriter.
Early on, I wrote a bunch of songs and was playing guitar a lot
but I didn't have the guts to actually get out on stage and play
anywhere. Some friends talked me into going to an open-mic night
at the Recovery Room at the Lubbock Inn. It was my first open-mic, and they asked me if I wanted
the regular Thursday night gig. That's how I got my first regular
gig. I played my original songs and a lot of John Prine,
Roger Miller, and Donovan covers. They were great
because no one knew those songs; everyone thought they were originals.

Chris: Briefly describe the Recovery Room.

Skoob: They have these machines on the ceiling which
are supposed to suck out all the cigarette smoke, but they are
never on so it is just a cloud of smoke in there. It's a hotel
bar that looks like something out of a Bukowski novel;
it is dark and shady, built in the 'seventies. It has a great
jukebox. There is always someone in there playing music, and
they are not getting paid shit. It's a great place to drink in
the afternoon because it's dark, so you don't feel as bad about
it. It technically is a hotel lounge.
I played a couple of other open-mics around town, when John Sprottcomplimented me on my version
of Neil Young's "Needle and the Damage Done,"
which was actually me forgetting the words and making up different
ones on the spot. Sprott said, "I've never heard that version;
it was great." Around Lubbock, there is a story about Sprott
and D.G. Flewellyn
collaring Pat Green
when he was still at Tech and telling him to stop giving it away,
that he needed to charge more for his shows because he was too
good and he was taking too much money out of the other musician's
pockets. The story I heard was that Pat Green came from some
family money and would just pay his band out his own pocket and
play for next to nothing, if anything at all. The older guys
informed him that he needed to charge for his shows because it
was taking food out of their families' mouths. They ended up
talking to me about the same thing but they were much nicer about
it. There came a point when some of the older musicians around
Lubbock sat me down and said, "You've cut your teeth, and
now you're good enough to start charging more." They were
very nice and I took it as a compliment but they explained exactly
what they thought I ought to be charging.
I have always played lead guitar like B.B. King or Jimmy
Vaughan, where there's a lyric and a run; I don't play a
lot of chords or switch back and forth. Right about the time
Sprott and D.G. confronted me, that is when I hooked up with
Los Sonsabitches and I played lead guitar for them. Los Sonsabitches
describe their music as alternative meta-country: comprised of
Bryan Wheeler; Matt
Lara, from Amarillo, on accordion, harmonica, and
didgeridoo; Jeremiah Goyette was in and out of the
band; a girl drummer named Amanda Keys;
Shad Daughtery joined later. Bryan Wheeler is an artist who I
had met around the Hub City Brewery; he and his brother Jeff Wheeler did all the chalk board
drawings there. Bryan and Jeff used to host these art and music
events called Ulterior Motifs at their downtown studio.
I had gotten to know Matt Lara through mutual friends and he
asked me to try out with them as lead guitar when Jeremiah was
going to Buffalo for that summer. Bryan
Wheeler, a/k/a Bubba Earl, is probably my all-time
favorite songwriter; the guy writes amazing songs and he throws
a lot of curve balls. I made it through the audition and hung
in there. We were all pretty early in our careers, so the fact
that I even made it through the rehearsal was impressive to him
so he asked me to come again the next day. I learned a lot about
running a band from Bubba, some of it good and some not so good.
One thing Bubba has always done is that it is usually every man
for themselves, sink or swim; you are not going to get a lot
of talk about what key the song is in; you are expected to just
be ready to go. Any time anybody sits in with Los Sonsabitches,
you know they are good. If someone tries out with us and stumbles
through it the first time out, usually they won't last. We are
spontaneous, especially when we play live; it's a feeling thing.
If you don't feel it the first time, you probably won't feel
it the next. If you work toward it and eventually get it, that's
great; come back and see us then.

Chris: How does Los Sonsabitches describe its music?

Skoob: If you go to their MySpace page, it is described as "alternative
meta-country." When I first started with Los Sonsabitches,
they were trying to be a country band, and they called themselves
Bubba Earl and the Panhandlers.
Bubba Earl is primarily an artist, first and foremost. As great
as Bubba is at writing songs, music was always his side-gig and
he never really took it that seriously. When I first joined them,
we shot around some other names, like The
Drunken Assholes; Faces for
Radio was another good one. When someone came up with
Los Sonsabitches, I wanted to go with that because, in a lot
of ways, it was really the least offensive one. Another suggestion
was I Chingaderos, which
Bubba had used before but had gotten in trouble with the Lubbock
Avalanche Journal because they finally figured out what it meant
after they already had been printing promotions for his shows.
For awhile back then, we would show up for gigs and play under
a different name every time, like the Idalou
All-Stars, the Janet Reno
Project, or Marty McFly and
the Flux Capacitors. We played Einstein's Coffee a
lot back then, around 1996-97.

Chris: Did you have good crowds and were you making
any money at it, or were you just doing it to get drunk and laid?
What was keeping you interested in being in the band?

Skoob: We didn't make any money at all. We were really
just starting out. For me, I had gotten completely absorbed in
music, and I wanted to play all the time. I got pretty good at
lead guitar but I got to the point where I knew that I wasn't
going to get any better at lead. Bubba always leaves Lubbock
in the summers, and he took off about this time. I did one or
two more gigs where I fronted the band and we used some different
guys. That's when I put the Snack-tones together but that band
was not together very long because there were two young kids
in the band, nineteen years old, and neither made their grades
so they both had to go back to their hometowns. While I was in
school, I spent very little time on school work; I'd go to class
everyday, take really good notes, read the notes right before
the test, and I slid through like that. I was spending all my
time practicing and writing music. But I had really never run
a band yet. Jesse, the bass player who named me Skoob, really
ran the Snack-tones, although we did do some of my original songs.
And I had played with Bubba and tried to use his band while he
was out of town; there were some great moments but there were
also some train wrecks. So I was getting my first taste of being
in a band and all that.
Well, I graduated from Tech, and I just decided that I was going
to move to Oregon. I wasn't tied to Lubbock anymore, so I took
off for awhile. I did move to Oregon and tried to play some solo
gigs as Doctor Skoob, but I just could not get a gig out there.
I dropped off CDs at several venues and didn't get a call for
about three and half months, and I hadn't even been able to get
a job delivering pizza because the economy there was crappy.
A friend offered me a job building decks in Colorado. I had never
built decks but I was willing. I took advantage of the mountains,
did some rock climbing, but I wasn't spending any money. I wasn't
really playing much music because my hands were so torn up at
the end of each day; although I was writing a lot of songs. I'd
pick up the guitar just long enough to write the song. I did
play a couple of gigs at a local bar in Arvada, between Boulder
and Denver but not much. Solitude is good. I was building up
a stack of songs.
I came back down to Lubbock to record what originally was going
to be a demo but became a full twelve song CD. I came back to
Lubbock because I could pretty much record it for free there.
John Williams from Los Sonsabitches
and Bubba Earl had gotten hold of a studio space in the old Masonic
Lodge in downtown Lubbock. That's the place where they later
held their Ulterior Motif parties. They lived in the back of
that place and set up the computer and sound system for their
own studio. We recorded my first record there, called "Where Sleeping Dogs Lie."
It was an interesting record because it has a lot of really odd
instrumentations, like the mixture of trumpet and banjo. I am
always interested in unusual combinations of instruments; and
I think the accordion with anything is interesting. Matt Lara
played accordion, harmonica, and hand drums. John Williams mixed
the sound and did all the bass parts. Nic
Shute played trumpet. Austin
Davis on electric banjo; he's a kid phenom, extremely
talented. I
played the rhythm and lead guitar, both. We knocked out all twelve
songs in about in week. To me, the highlight of that album is
a song called "Brenda," which is about a girl who steals
this orca-fat guy's remote control and thus his heart. That is
the hidden track at the end of the CD but turns out that is the
one song people like best off that album. It's funny because
it was a total joke which I wrote in about fifteen minutes in
the studio while John was recording his bass parts. For the backup
vocals, we decided to go to the Hub City Brewery and get smashed
and then come back to sing it, so the backups are all off-key
and horrible sounding. It was meant as a joke but that song caught
on and people like it.
Working with all those guys on that record, I felt like I was
home again. Oregon and Colorado never felt right. I came back
to Lubbock because I feel comfortable there. After a week and
a half in Lubbock working on that album, I called my friend in
Colorado and said, "Dude, I am not coming back; I'm staying
down here."

Chris: Was your plan to start making it now as a professional
musician? Recording more? What were you going to do in Lubbock?

Skoob: I don't think I had much of a plan still. That
same first week, I picked up a job from Jason
Courtney, who was the brewmaster at Hub
City Brewery; he and his wife Sarah
owned the home brew supply store across the street. They asked
me if I know how to use a scale and I said yeah, so I was hired.
We'd get maybe two customers a day, and half the time one of
those was trying to walk into the barber shop next door or people
who were just curious. All the customers who actually did homebrew
knew exactly what they wanted so really all I had to do was work
the register and weigh out hops, one of the easiest best jobs
I've ever had. I did that until they sold the store.
During that time, I was doing a lot of weird performance art
things. I had written a couple of scripts, and we did one of
my plays, which was a disaster because I had never directed a
play before but it was fun and funny; it did get a good reaction.
When Matt Lara and I get
together we come up with these bizarre ideas, and a lot of times
we'll actually try to do them. One night, Matt dressed up like
a German organ grinder and I dressed up like a monkey. Matt had
printed up some crazy manifesto to pass out to all the drunk
kids down in the Depot District, on the corner in front of Clouseau's;
Sgt.
Steve Monday was playing there that night. I got in full-on
monkey character, including simulating the throwing of feces
and humping people's legs. We had a sign that said, "Give
me $5 or I'll kick the monkey." Everybody tried to give
us five dollars for a chance to kick the monkey, so I was constantly
having to run away from these drunks but I never broke monkey
character. Another friend of ours filmed it and we actually showed
it at an art show, where it got a great response.

Chris: Okay, so tell me, how was this helping your
career?

Skoob: This helped my career because Fletcher
Murchison, the mandolin player, walked by when we
were doing this. He was going in to see Sgt. Steve Monday. That
was the only time I broke character. I ran over and grabbed him
and told him I was starting a new band and would he be interested
in playing with us?

Chris: Yeah, the guy in the monkey suit

Skoob: Well, Fletcher and I already knew each other.
Fletch had tried out for Doctor Skoob and the Snack-tones on
guitar but the problem with Fletch was that I was the lead guitar
and he's far better than I was, so I couldn't let him in the
band at that time. Actually, another guy named Brian
Hamilton(everybody calls him Bone, like hambone)
tried out for the Snack-tones and didn't get it for the same
reason, and he's now the amazing guitar player in a band called
Yamn,
which is pretty big on the jam band circuit. Bone grew up with
Jesse, the guy who named me Skoob. I could do an entire interview
about great players who tried out to be in my bands. But getting
Fletcher in the band was the start of putting together Doctor Skoob and the Acoustic Groove.
I shopped the demo CD around and the Spoon called to book me.
We had a regular Monday night gig and a lot of people came out.
It was mostly college kids in the jam band crowd, hippie deadhead
types, although we weren't really a jam band then; we were an
accordion, guitar, and mandolin although we did have a hand drum,
which is kind of hippie. We started picking up other gigs, and
the steady Wednesday night gig at Jazz is when we really started
to get big in Lubbock. Jazz became the place to be on Wednesday
night. By this point, there constantly were guys coming in and
out of the band, to the point where, when I booked a gig, I didn't
always know who was going to show up to play. Matt moved to Austin.
Fletcher joined a bluegrass band. Nic was just filling in at
first
but he stayed with me the whole time, and his trumpet became
what a lot of people think of as our sound. But I was the only
person who remained constant in the band, so I was Doctor Skoob
by default. I have had a dozen different guitar players and I'm
always open to different things, like the banjo.
We were playing all the right places at the right times, like
Jazz and Crickets because we had gotten popular enough
that we were able to book anywhere we wanted. Also, I was on
the bill at all the Ulterior Motif parties and those did a lot
for our exposure because they bring in a lot of people who would
have never seen you or heard of you. Once we got good enough,
everyone remembered our name. And we were different; for one,
we didn't play any cover songs, or if we did they were very obscure.

Chris: That's interesting, because I frequently hear
people say that to survive playing music in Lubbock you have
to play cover songs because that is all anybody wants to hear
but then the bands that end up being really popular are the bands
with the balls to play their original music.

Skoob: Yes, you're right. It is tough, but like I've
told Andy Eppler, you
just gotta keep doing it. Andy is good; he's holding true. It's
like giving a kid medicine; the audience may not want it so you
have to sweeten it up so they'll like your stuff. You react to
the crowd and play off their emotions, sense what they're into
and take the show more that direction; interact with the audience.
We've done as well with teenagers as with much older crowds,
y'know people older than me.

Chris: So you developed a good crowd, earned the respect
of your musician peers, things seemed to be going fairly well
for you in Lubbock. I may be jumping ahead here but I'd like
to know how you made the decision to become another Lubbock musician
in Austin?

Skoob: By that point, I was already fully committed
to music. There was nothing else I could do, or at least nothing
else I was that good at. I was making a living at it, not a great
one but I was making enough money to survive just playing music.
Eventually, I wanted to be on the road and tour. I felt that
if I kept playing my original music in Lubbock, then everybody
was going to get sick of me. I wanted to get on the road and
get the songs out there because nobody is going to hear them
unless I play them. I had gone on a four or five week tour with
Los Sonsabitches up through the Pacific Northwest and back down
the coast; we played about twenty gigs. And my band hit Taos
and Houston and Austin. We came down to Austin fairly regularly.
I knew we played well to diverse crowds because we had always
done well every place we played, so I really wanted to be on
tour.
However, the musicians in Lubbock, most of them, are very set
on just being in Lubbock. They don't want to go on the road,
for whatever reason day job, school, whatever. There is
just not a big enough pool of musicians who are willing to go
on tour.
I decided to move to Austin because I felt like I had gone as
far as I could in Lubbock. I still love Lubbock and it is still
one of my favorite places to be, even more so to play. But it
got to the point where I thought I had to get to Austin where
the industry is. The music industry in Lubbock is pretty much
nonexistent; there are a couple of good recording studios but
nobody is really pushing anything local. I couldn't even get
the college station KTXT to play my records, which blew
my mind. I hate to get into this, but they do not play enough
local music in Lubbock. Every once in awhile a deejay will play
something local but usually because it's by one of their friends.
When I was in school, I even deejayed a jam band show on KTXT
for awhile, called Electric Kool-Aid. That's how I met Sgt. Steve
Monday and thus Nic, who plays with them, because they gave me
their CD to play. I was always down for playing local music because
if the college stations don't play it, no one will. But my record
got more play on FMX than KTXT.

Chris: I've noticed that since you've been in Austin,
you have played in Lubbock several times. In fact, I believe
you're going back to Lubbock for another gig tomorrow. I don't
mean this facetiously but do you ever play in Austin, now that
you're here?

Skoob: When I got down here, I don't think I realized
how burnt out I was. I was playing easily two hundred and twenty
shows a year for the past three or four years.
I had saved a bunch of money before I moved here, and I definitely
suggest to any musician that you have some pocket money when
you move to Austin because the cost of living is much more here
than other places in Texas, certainly much more than Lubbock.
And I can live on next to nothing. More than playing music, I
was really burnt out on the effort to book gigs. That work really
takes a lot out of me. The first couple of weeks I was in Austin,
I got thrown a lot of gigs from bands that I knew already. Cellus
and the Loose Grip had me come out and play at a number
of their shows on 6th Street. Matt Lara's current band Winchester
Twin had me play at a few of their shows at Saxon Pub.
All the Austin gigs I have played so far since I've been here
are ones that just fell in my lap. To answer your question, the
reason I have been playing more gigs in Lubbock since I've been
in Austin is because I have gotten more calls from Lubbock since
I've been here. Lubbock misses me as much as I miss it, which
is good. I still haven't gotten back into the swing of booking
my own gigs, and I've just been getting my feet wet here in Austin.
Also, I had kind of been waiting for Shad Daughtery to move down
here, and he is coming back with me to Austin when I get back from a
trip to Taos next week.

Chris: Shad is moving to Austin; so Lubbock is losing
another good guitar player to Austin, huh?

Skoob: Shad, a/k/a Kid Shadow was a fifteen year old
phenom. When he was a kid he would play on stage with people
like Jr. Medlow and the Texas
Belairs. The
Texas Belairs wanted to take him on tour when he was
only fifteen but his mom wanted no part of her child traveling
the country with the Mings
brothers. But he was that good then. He grew up and played in
Orange County and a couple of other bands. He moved to a town
in Illinois near Chicago where he got a job working for Washburn
Guitars. He eventually came back to Lubbock, where I met him
through Mike
Bee, who played drums for me and Los Sonsabitches, and
now he plays for Cellus and the Loose Grip. Mike introduced Shad
to Bubba because they needed a guitar player. Shad have never
seen me play but apparently had been talking shit about me, saying
Doctor Skoob is over-rated. When we met, we got along much to
Shad's surprise. Later, he came and saw us play and he actually
liked the show. There came a time when I needed a bass player
at the last minute and Mike suggested Shadow. I asked if he could
even play bass, and Mike said, "Dude, Shad can play anything."
As great a lead guitar player he is, Shad is probably the best
bass player I have ever worked with, and I have played with some
really top-notch bass players. Shad has a great ear and knows
when to play and when not to.
I hate playing solo; I just don't enjoy it as much as playing
with a band. I like to have somebody to interact with. Shad is
probably one of my favorite people to do that with. Also, he
and I get along real well; he calls me on my bullshit and I do
the same thing with him.

Chris: What should people expect when they see a Doctor
Skoob show? Is it more about the music or the lyrics?

Skoob: It varies. It is always pretty much the same
songs but always different versions and takes on them depending
on who I have playing with me that weekend. Regarding music and
lyrics, it's both; how the music makes the lyrics work. A lot
of the lyrics to my songs are kind of sad but playing in bars,
I learned early on, you can only get away with playing so many
sad songs before you lose the audience. The lyrics may be sad
or pissed off but we present them in funky upbeat versions, to
make it more listenable. When somebody asks me to describe our
show, I stumble because I don't really give it much forethought.
I have absolutely no idea what genre we are but I call it Cosmic
Americana; we are probably a folk-rock band at heart. I don't
think about what message I am trying to convey; I just write
the songs as they come to me without really thinking about what
anyone should get from it. Usually the presentation is just how
we feel that night. Its just music; I try not to overcomplicate
what it means.

Chris: Do you prefer people to be dancing and not listening
to the lyrics or do you prefer that they stay seated and listen
to the words?

Skoob: I prefer to see people get up and dance, then
you know they are having a good time and that I've done my job
as an entertainer. Cary Swinney
has said that he likes my music but he can't understand the lyrics;
that's cool with me. That's why people are supposed to buy the
albums, because in a crowded bar, odds are that you're not going
to be able to understand me.

Chris: Speaking of lyrics, I wanted to ask you about
one song in particular which I really like on your Gringo Sol record: "Vegan
Interior." Tell me about the origins of that song and where
the title came from?

Skoob: That is a perfect example of a rare song where
I actually was trying to say something rather than just tell
a story. It's about making fun of the pseudo-hippie culture that
you see now, because I was part of that culture. I had dreadlocks
at one time, and I went through that phase. I was kind of coming
out of that phase around the time of my second move back to Lubbock.
The story about where the title came from is a funny story. I
was traveling on Interstate 94 going from Chicago to my sister's
house in Milwaukee. A friend of mine who was with me had noticed
a car which had passed us several times which had a bumper sticker
that says "Go Vegan." They all had dreadlocks, and
were all hippied out. I said, "So what?" And he told
me to look at the interior of their car and it was all leather.
That's where the name "Vegan Interior" came from.
I hit a point in my life where that pseudo-hippie culture had
been a fun phase but it was time to grow up. That lifestyle is
not anything that anyone should really take too seriously; it's
a right of passage but it's silly to take your hippie-ness too
seriously. You can still smoke pot without making a religion
out of it.

Chris: I lived in northern California for awhile and
a lot of those people think Jerry Garcia is Jesus Christ
and they are worse than Baptists, in that if you don't dress
the right way and know the correct canon of the Gospel of Jerry,
then you are an ignorant, unwashed outcast. To me, they are naive
hypocrites because it is obvious they don't get a word Jerry
Garcia was saying. No wonder he was a heroin addict and put himself
into a junk food coma for several years. Jerry had a this horde
of worshippers who weren't even hearing a word he was telling
them, which is to live their own life and not follow the standards
of society or some charismatic leader.

Skoob: That is exactly what "Vegan Interior"
is about. The first line is "So you say you want to be a
hippie..." and the whole song is calling these people out
on their hypocritical shit; like these tour kids who drive across
the country for a show in their range rovers and SUVs, or they
preach to you about saving the environment
while handing out thousands of paper fliers which end up in the
trash.

Chris: When you're performing that song, is it popular
with those kids?

Skoob: Actually, I lost the hippie crowd in Lubbock
over that song. It has a reggae beat, and they liked it at first
but pretty soon they caught on and they all thought I was Judas.
The deejay who took over my Electric Kool-Aid show at KTXT played
the song and afterwards said, "Wow, that was kind of harsh,"
and as far as I know they never played us again.

Chris: Can you sum up how your experiences in Lubbock
had affected you as a musician?

Skoob: Straight up, I would not be a musician if I
had never come to Lubbock. Lubbock is one of those towns where
the artsy musicians and cool kids all find each other somehow.
It's always been like that, even back to the days of Buddy Holly or later Joe
Ely. You just end up meeting other people who love music
and can play. Lubbock is small enough that coincidences inevitably
lead you to meeting other people who share your love of music.
My whole life and career have been by accident. I never had a
plan, I just wound up there. Same with the way I write my songs,
I don't have a plan when I write them but they eventually evolve
into something after working them out with other musicians.END of Interview